Negro with a Hat by Colin Grant

Author:Colin Grant [Grant, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446400449
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

LAST STOP LIBERIA

It is certainly better for American Negroes to die of African fever in the efforts to contribute to Africa’s development, than to be riddled by the bullets of the white mob who control the local government of the United States.

Orishatuke Faduma (American Negro Academy, 1915)

WHEN the card was posted through her door telling Josie Gatlin to get out of town before 1 June, she knew just what to do: she packed. The 3,000 black residents of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, had received similar threats, and a local white newspaper had published a warning on its front page: the entire ‘colored’ population was ordered not just out of the town of Okmulgee but out of the state of Oklahoma ‘or suffer the consequences’.

A few days later, Josie Gatlin’s party of four gathered together their most precious belongings and set off from Oklahoma. Mrs Gatlin was convinced that if she got as far as the water then her great trek would be almost over. By the water she meant Manhattan. Once they reached New York, there was only ever one destination in mind for Josie Gatlin and the members of her impromptu emigration club – the headquarters of the UNIA in Harlem. All she’d need to do thereafter would be to make her way to the pier at 135th Street, and walk up the gangway of the Black Star liner that would carry her to Liberia.

There was one major snag: Garvey’s clever propagandists hadn’t anticipated their arrival. The BOI informant in their midst reported how perplexed UNIA staff were at the sight of these natives of Oklahoma, laden with trunks and suitcases, besieging their offices. The vanguard from Okmulgee were proof not just of the fear of violence at the hands of a white mob, but also that the Black Star Line propaganda had been successful – perhaps a little too much so, because the UNIA’s prospective ocean liner, the SS Phyllis Wheatley, was not yet in their possession.1

Oklahoma had itself been the centre of an earlier migration of black families from the deeper South, lured by the prospect of open land and affordable homesteads; the discovery of oil had fuelled a mini-boom that peaked at the start of the twentieth century. Thousands of African-American households had followed the unpromisingly named ‘trail of tears’ and escaped the vagaries of their disenfranchised, dirt-poor existence in Mississippi and Louisiana. Many found the claims made for Oklahoma had been exaggerated and their lot only marginally improved; and further that with black elevation came white resentment. Josie Gatlin got out just before the start of a terrifying riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma just 30 miles from Okmulgee.

It had all begun innocuously. A young black delivery boy, Dick Rowland, had been charged with attempting to assault a seventeen-year-old white elevator girl in the Drexel building. In fact, Rowland had merely tripped on entering the elevator and brushed alongside the girl. He was arrested nonetheless and a wild storm of rumours quickly spread. An angry, armed white mob converged on the jail.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.